Software applications for standalone computing devices often feature sophisticated and interactive graphical user interfaces (GUIs) having windows. Dialogue windows for user input (i.e., modal windows) can be dazzling in the interactive detail of their text dialogue boxes, buttons, and icons and in the power and variety of editing tools made available to a user. Even non-modal windows are highly customized in many software applications and sophisticated in the manner in which they change focus, layer with each other, and interact with a primary window. Pop-up menus, having layered submenus and shortcut keys are taken for granted. All these elegant GUIs, however, are difficult to reproduce in web pages to be used on an internet because web pages generally use web content publishing languages, such as hypertext markup language (HTML). Application programmers and web page authors have very different tools at their disposal.
Conventionally, markup languages, such as HTML, do not have the interface capability of a GUI platform for a software application. This increases the skill required for entry-level and even experienced web designers to produce web pages that have sophisticated interactive functionality: the web designer must also be a programmer, or at least rely on one.
Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and web scripting have increased the capability of HTML and other languages that are popular for creating web pages to perform with more sophisticated interactivity. But this improvement still does not approach that of software application GUIs, especially with respect to web pages used with different types of browsers. A web page author contemplating either a sophisticated GUI or a customized window in a web page has limited choices: write additional web pages to create entirely separate windows (serious programming commitment), or use “canned” web page code to make stock windows (not very customizable). Writing another web page, to be created as an entirely separate window, e.g., for an interactive dialogue, complicates accessing variables and/or content on the primary web page originating the new web page window and requires the web page developer to write event-trapping code to invoke the dialogue.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional website 100 appearing on a display screen 102 of a computing device 104, wherein a web page document 106 includes a program listing having markup instructions 108, 110 that are rendered by a web browser 112 into a graphical user interface (GUI) consisting of multiple web page windows 114, 116. (A web page document 106 is to be distinguished from a content document, such as a text document, that is displayed as textual content in a rendered web page.) An introductory or home web page window 114 typically links or branches to a more interactive web page window 116 having one or more interactive user interfaces (UIs) 118, 120, 122 if a user decides to engage in a dialogue or transaction via input and/or editing controls of the interactive web page window 116. To present an interactive web page window 116 having interactive UIs 118, 120, 122 suitable for substantial dialogue or transactions, a web designer typically embarks on multiple separate web page projects, one for each web page window associated with the website 100. Having to design a separate web page for each window may discourage some web designers, especially when some of the windows to be used in a website 100 include relatively complex interactive dialogue and/or transaction controls.